The View From 1776

“Truthiness” and Secular Education

The “truthiness” of secular education is the common link among Michael Moore, Teddy Kennedy, Jack Abramoff, and the parade of literary fraud in periodicals and books.

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“Truthiness,” selected by the American Dialectic Society as its 16th annual Word of the Year, is defined as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.” Truthiness is the quality to which PC and multi-cultural education aspire.

Our secular schools, from kindergarten to college, teach the atheistic philosophy of pragmatism. It is to be expected that people will govern their actions by the maxim they are taught, that the end justifies the means.

Truthiness is thus a synonym for liberal-progressivism, the American sect of the world religion of atheistic socialism, which rejects all standards of fixed morality and embraces instead the belief that the political state will shape social classes into perfection via regulation. Individuals are relieved from responsibility for their actions and left free to pursue hedonistic license, sensual gratification, by whatever means they can get away with.

Only a God-fearing society educates each individual to the standard of eternal Truth. Only a God-fearing society leads individuals to strive, voluntarily and joyously, to do the right thing, to treat each of their fellows justly and kindly.

From a philosophical viewpoint, truthiness arises from socialism’s inversion of the Judeo-Christian formulation of God’s message to Moses from the burning bush that was not consumed by the flames: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14).

Within the limited capacities of human intelligence to comprehend the ultimate nature of existence, the Judeo-Christian understanding is that, for God alone, existence precedes essence. That means that God’s nature or characteristics did not exist prior to God, but that, for God alone, His act of existing determines His characteristics and the nature of all of His cosmological creation, including human beings. There is thus no escape from the eternal truth that humans have a God-given nature and that the purpose of mankind is to be as true as possible, given human free will, to that nature.

The truthiness of atheistic and materialistic socialism turns that upon its head and declares that the mind of the intellectual has the power to control and to determine the characteristics of all it surveys. Thus truth is whatever the intellectual mind decides, at any given moment, it ought to be (as in judicial activism).

In a society governed by the truthiness of atheistic socialism, there is no virtuous conduct, merely doing whatever one can get away with or being compelled by regulation to do whatever the intellectuals decree. Individual morality, doing the right thing, is a meaningless concept.

Truthiness is not really new, of course. It has always been with us as an aspect of human free will. The essential feature of a God-fearing society is conscious rejection of truthiness, which the Bible calls repentance of sin, a turning toward the righteous conduct that flows from God’s love.

Truthiness led corporate executives in Enron to present financial statements that proved to be somewhat closer to fiction than reality.

Truthiness leads Oprah to rationalize her selection of James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” now revealed as fiction rather than biography. According to liberal columnist Clarence Page, she said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” that “even if some of its facts are false, its truths are too compelling to be ignored.”

Truthiness leads the New York Times and the Washington Post to encourage its reporters to ‘discover’ evidence to support the liberal-progressive dogma of social justice, to present fiction as ‘news’ that appears to validate the socialistic belief that all of life’s ills arise from unequal distribution of purely material goods.

Truthiness leads liberal-progressives to revere liars as their exemplars of correct secular conduct.

Liberal-progressives adore Michael Moore’s ‘documentaries,’ evidently because their desire to destroy President Bush is more important than truthful presentation of fact.

Liberal-progressives adore Senator Edward Kennedy, a man who was expelled from Harvard for cheating, a man who valued his political career above the life of a young woman.

Liberal-progressives adore Senator John Kerry, a man who launched his political career on false testimony in a Congressional committee hearing in the Vietnam War era.

Too many politicians on both sides of the aisle take payoffs from the Jack Abramoffs of the lobbyists’ world, secure in the socialist credo that individual conduct doesn’t count in a society shaped and controlled by socialistic regulation.

It’s too easy to rationalize trading political power for personal gain in a society in which Baby Boomers can indulge freely in sexual promiscuity, marital infidelity, drug abuse, and self-dealing corruption, secure in the truthiness both that the political state owes them a good life, and that the political state is the only source of good.

All of the kings horses and all of the kings men can’t build enough commissions and enough regulations to put society back together again. Only repentance, a turn away from secular materialism, a turn back to God-fearing personal morality can do that.

So long as we continue to follow the socialistic, atheistic, and materialistic lead of the ACLU and ban all morality from classrooms, our nation is rocketing on the path to oblivion.